San Diego firm hits targets for complex lasers

Dennis Huynh, a Cymer technician and quality assurance expert performs the final checks on an Extreme Ultraviolet light source vessel before shipment to a customer. The light source unit is part of an Extreme Ultraviolet scanner used to pattern semiconductor chip during production.
— Howard Lipin

Dennis Huynh, a Cymer technician and quality assurance expert performs the final checks on an Extreme Ultraviolet light source vessel before shipment to a customer. The light source unit is part of an Extreme Ultraviolet scanner used to pattern semiconductor chip during production.
— Howard Lipin

Taking the next step to make chips even smaller has been a technological challenge. Yet it’s vital for the industry that is increasingly going mobile.

“Mobile means battery-operated devices, and we want to make these devices work longer and longer,” said Mushell of Gartner. “The only way to do that is to have (chip) geometries that are smaller and smaller.”

For years, Cymer has been a market leader in making semiconductor production lasers used by giant chip makers such as Intel and Samsung. The company’s current lasers, known as Deep Ultraviolet lithography, produce lines in circuit patterns to carry electrical current down to about 32 nanometers in size.

To get an idea of how small that is, a very fine human hair is about 10,000 nanometers wide.

To go even smaller than that, Cymer is focused on EUV technology.

A key hurdle for EUV lasers has been ratcheting up power levels for mass production. Chip makers want to run their assembly lines as fast as possible. The more power flowing through EUV lasers, the less time a silicon wafer needs to be exposed to the light, which allows semiconductor makers to speed up production.

What is EUV?

Extreme ultraviolet: An advanced lithography used in a semiconductor production line to etch lines on silicon. It has a shorter light wavelength, 13.5 nanometers, than current lithography lasers, which are reaching their limits in terms of shrinking circuit patterns.

The chips produced with EUV: Light sources are projected to be as much as 100 times faster than today’s most powerful computer chips, with 1,000 times the memory capacity. Flash memory devices and dynamic random access memory (DRAM) devices are expected to be early adopters of EUV technology.

Source: Cymer

Chip makers eventually want EUV lasers to blast wafers at 250 watts of power. For much of past year, the best Cymer and others have been able to produce is 10 watts. At that power level, the wafer must sit in front of the light beams for a relatively long time before the circuit pattern takes.

“These (laser) machines are attached to a lot of other machines in that production line,” said Mushell. “You probably have $20 million or $30 million (in equipment) patched together. If one slows down, it slows everything down.”

In late February, Cymer ran one of its EUV laser systems in a demonstration for six hours at 40 watts of power. It delivered stable doses of light.

It also demonstrated a one-hour run at 55 watts with similar dose stability.

“The jump to 40 watts is a significant boost and the next step in the timeline for EUV power sources,” said Dean Freeman, a research vice president at Gartner.

Cymer technician work on a Extreme Ultraviolet laser at the company's factory in San Diego
— Howard Lipin

Cymer technician work on a Extreme Ultraviolet laser at the company's factory in San Diego
— Howard Lipin

There’s a long way to go. But Cymer thinks it will be able to boost the power of EUV lasers to meet chip makers’ needs.

“Our goal is to reach 250 watts next year,” said Nigel Farrar, vice president of lithography application development at Cymer. “The fact that we’ve validated that it works up to the 40-watt to 50-watt level, it’s very encouraging in terms of future scaling.”